NASA has been accused of covering up evidence of all manner of lifeforms on Mars: lizards, snakes, rats and squirrels, among other things. But has it really been covering up an even bigger secret?
Yes indeed, according to an article Thomas Elway wrote for the May 1930 Popular Science.
He starts off with a catalog of facts about Mars: "Mars is so like the earth that men might live there. It has air, water, vegetation, and a twenty-four hour succession of day and night, and daily temperatures no hotter and nights not much colder than are known on earth. But because Mars has no mountain ranges and probably never had an ice age, it is considered high improbable that it is inhabited by manlike creatures..."
What Mars is inhabited by, Elway concludes, is giant beavers.
His reasoning is impeccable. Mars, he tells us, has oxygen. Only plants can produce free oxygen in an atmosphere. Therefore Mars has plants. Since Mars resembles earth in just about every other way, Elway reasons that the evolution of life on Mars proceeded along similar lines.
But, without having had an Ice Age—which on earth created the "stress and competition that is supposed to have turned mankind's anthropoid ancestors into men"—there can be no intelligent life on the red planet. What animal life there is must still be "in the age of instinct."
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